Author Description

In a style meditative, lyrical, succinct and spare, Robbi Nester turns her poet’s seeing eye and hearing ear, perked for the intriguing, very much towards a world full of “others”—bees, binturongs, muskrats, sea lions, luna moths, swallowtails, orchids, seventeen-year locusts, the Bedouin in the desert, the dead—in ways that respect their otherness, yet always touch our human selves. The self is here, too, born out of the “meager means” of a childhood—with a “grim gargoyle” of a father “full of fury”—yet, learning “how to take / the little that I had / making it more than suffice.” These are poems lit by metaphors and codas of startling beauty and rightness. A seal with its eyes shut spins in place: “calm face composed, resembling a dead pharaoh / wrapped tight within his gold / sarcophagus, entering / the next world.” For that Bedouin whose desert is like the sea: “Far away, the surf rises / arched wings of the angel, / messenger of the desert God, / whose silence contains everything.” There is joy here at being in the center of “everything that is,” hardly able to sleep “in all this brightness,” joy in the hands that “can close / the circuit between body /and mind,” in the hand that can, indeed, write “it all down.”<br/>Judy Kronenfeld<br/>Open Other-Wise and enter Robbi Nester’s acutely observed world. There are two places to look for the poem—inside one’s self or outside one’s self. The best poets begin one place and reach the other, as Nester does in “Seal”: I watched one spin in place/ eyes closed, as I did once at five, / falling in a dizzy heap to watch/the room spin, the familiar/turning alien but quickly taking shape/ . . .<br/>I admit my favorite section is the third, entitled Me; it is here that Nester turns her laser gaze to the brutal terrain of childhood and the poems that emerge are clear, startling, unforgettable, and necessary. The poem “Labor Day,” about her teen-aged job in an aquarium, prefigures her future: "couldn’t keep quiet / if customers /